India Positive: New Essays and Selected Columns by Bhagat Chetan

Author:Bhagat, Chetan [Bhagat, Chetan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2019-05-01T16:00:00+00:00

In these San-sad Times, Call a Virtual Session of Parliament

The ruling party, the Opposition and citizens must act together to ensure sessions of Parliament are not wasted

I don’t know what is more disturbing: the fact that entire sessions of Parliament are routinely washed out in our country, or that we aren’t as bothered by this fact as we should be. What can we do about it anyway? We didn’t like the previous government, under which Parliament had ceased to work. So we elected a new majority government. Now even this government can’t seem to make Parliament work. What are we to do?

Take Parliament’s monsoon session in 2015, for instance. Some blame the Congress: they disrupted proceedings, so it is their fault. Others point fingers at the BJP for shielding its ministers. Proving our opponents’ party wrong seems to preoccupy us more than the fact that an entire session of Parliament was wasted.

We should be worried. If India just needed to maintain status quo in its policies and laws, the disruption would have mattered less. However, India is nowhere near the nothing-needs-to-change stage. We haven’t had a strong round of fundamental economic reforms since 1991. We don’t have a 10 per cent GDP growth rate, which we need to fulfil the aspirations of millions of young people. Doing business in India is still extraordinarily difficult; until that situation improves, a spurt in job growth won’t happen.

What can we do? Well, the BJP, the Congress and all of us citizens need to change a few things if we don’t want to be stuck in this deadlocked democracy forever.

First, it is in the best interests of the party in power, the BJP, to make Parliament work. This government still doesn’t have a corrupt image, despite the current controversies. However, what it doesn’t need is an image of ineffectiveness—of a government that can’t manage the country’s affairs or work with others in order to do so. What could it have done differently, for instance, in the case of Parliament’s monsoon session in 2015? First, even before the session started, the BJP could have addressed the issues related to Sushma Swaraj, Vasundhara Raje and Shivraj Singh Chouhan better. It chose to remain silent. Yes, these controversies were not comparable to the CWG or 2G scams. However, there were infractions and errors of judgement in Lalit Modi’s case.

A simple way to test this is to ask: would the government do it again? If the answer is ‘no’, then a clarification at least would be in order, if not a resignation. In the Vyapam case, for example, there was a need to ensure a fair inquiry. If the BJP had accepted this fast, it could have come across as humble, receptive and responsive. More importantly, it could have played the controversy on its own terms and defused the Congress attack. By then it was too late, however, and the party acted after being pushed into a corner. Eventually, they had to relent and offer multiple explanations, including Swaraj’s, in Parliament.

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